I'm Stearing Clear Of Heavy Machinery

Hello from soggy England! I'm in no condition to be writing right now, having spent the past 13 hours in transit, having slept for only 2 or 3 of those hours, and having taken a dose of over-the-counter sleeping medication too small to put me to sleep but just large enough to partially incapacitate me. Nonetheless, I'll try my best to string a few sentences together, because I really am so behind in telling you about last weekend's kitchen antics.

Last Saturday night we had The Viking's cycling team over for cocktails on the terrace. For them, it was a rare opportunity to socialize in a spandex-free environment; for me, it was a chance to attach faces to names and to corroborate The Viking's dubious-sounding claim that when he leaves the house at 5:45 every morning, it really is to ride a bike in circles around the park and not to hold up convenience stores or do drug deals or similar.

A cycling team is the perfect audience for an eager cook, consisting of the sort of stringbeany, twitchy men that need to eat almost constantly just to keep up with their raging metabolisms. Aside from the typical spread of assorted party foods (chips, dips, cheese plate, whathaveyou) I had two homemade items: roasted tomato, mozzarella, basil and brioche 'sliders,' and peanut butter and Concord grape jam sandwich cookies.



I was really worried about the brioche (this might be an overstatement. I really worry about the fact that I don't contribute to a 401k; I was somewhat nervous about the brioche.). I've never made it before and, well, given my track record with breads, I think I had legitimate cause for concern. Luckily the rolls came out of the oven soft and fluffy, and if not tasting exactly like the brioche that I'm used to, they did at least taste good. The 'sliders' (for the record, I think the word 'sliders' sounds trendy and ridiculous but I don't know what else to call these. Sandwiches? Canapes? I don't know.) were summery and fresh, wholesome without being heavy, which is exactly what I was going for.

As for the cookies: I have nothing but good things to say about the jam-making experience. I've been told before that "there's nothing to it," but only by the same type of people who say that there's nothing to knitting and there's nothing to refinishing your own furniture, so people who apparently have a higher threshold for tedious projects than I do. But there really is nothing to making jam. You heat the fruit with some lemon juice and sugar, strain out the juices, and then simmer the fruit juice on its own for 10 minutes or so. Then you wait for it to cool. That's it! And you have jam that is so, so much better than the store bought stuff.



When I saw Concord grapes at the greenmarket last week my mind immediately landed on jelly, and from there it drifted to peanut butter. Ergo peanut butter and jelly sandwiches -- hold the bread. I thought that they would be perfect for the gaggle of small children in attendance, but in the end it was their moms and dads that oooo'd and aaaahh'd over the cookies with a plainly nostalgic glow.



On a different subject, but before I forget it, sad news about our tomato plants: after having almost perished while we were in Morocco and then made a miraculous recovery, this week the tomato plants were stricken by tomato hornworms that have managed to eat every last leaf and most of our ripening fruit within a space of 72 hours. The Viking has had his eye on those tomatoes for over a month and is indignant; I don't really care about the tomatoes and mostly just mind being outsmarted by an invertebrate. This gardening stuff is hard.

How Pizza Turned Into Jerusalem Artichoke Risotto (By Accident)

I get a lot of questions about my cooking habits. Questions, and general puzzlement, and facial expressions that seem to say, "But why did you make your own salsa? Did that really seem like the best use of an hour of your life?"

Well, first of all, I don't have children. That frees up lots of time and creative energy right there. Second of all, the cooking sometimes happens by accident.

Take Friday night. I called The Viking utterly exhausted from the work week, and the conversation went something like this:

The Viking: What are we doing for dinner tonight?

Me: I don't know. I'm exhausted. I'm definitely not cooking tonight. Definitely not.

The Viking: OK, well we should just order pizza. Go home, put your feet up, and we'll order a pizza.

Me: Perfect.

And then my thoughts went something like this:

I'll just stop by the grocery store for some paper towels and OJ, on my way home.

...Now that I'm at the grocery store, I might as well pick up a frozen pizza. That will be cheaper than ordering pizza.

...But frozen pizza is so unhealthy, and it's never any good. As long as I'm here I might as well buy a chicken to roast. That's barely cooking.

....Ugh, look at this industrial, mass-produced chicken. It's so disgusting. I cannot, in good conscience, buy and eat this chicken.

....Hey look, arborio rice! I could make risotto, I even have Parmesan and white wine and chicken stock in the fridge. I haven't made risotto in ages. I'll just make really easy risotto and be done with it.

...Actually, I have those Jerusalem artichokes too. I wonder how you cook a Jerusalem artichoke? I wonder if you can make Jerusalem artichoke risotto...?

Fast forward to 9 PM, at which point I was pureeing sauteed Jerusalem artichokes in a food processor and folding them into a risotto with herbs and pancetta.

It was my first experience with Jerusalem artichokes, which are neither artichokes nor are they from Jerusalem.



They're a tuber that looks like a cross between ginger and a massage tool and tastes like a cross between a mushroom and an artichoke. Pureed and mixed into the risotto they in fact did add an earthy compliment to the smokey pancetta and full-bodied Parmesan. All in all, it was a nice dish.

Nicer than an evening on the couch with a beer, a slice, and an episode of Mad Men? That's up for debate.

Cookware Detente: Or, The Only 8 Pots & Pans That You Really Need

I have a cookware problem.

It's not actually a cookware problem so much as a storage problem, but it manifests itself in cookware. Everywhere. You may have heard the stereotype of the twenty-something urban woman who keeps shoes in her oven; well, I keep a stand mixer in my bedroom closet. Pots and pans live on the dining room chairs, until we have guests, and then they vacation on top of our bed. Open up a sideboard drawer and you might find a pasta machine; look inside an end table and what should you see but an extra whisk (in case of whisking emergencies). This state of affairs irritates The Viking, but instead of speaking up he quietly retaliates by purchasing something along the lines of a spare set of bicycle wheels. Which I will then find stashed in the laundry closet. And so the arms race escalates.

When I bought all of these kitchen items, I think I honestly felt that each and every one of them would be useful -- nay, indespensable! Sure, I had enough good sense to avoid the belgian waffle maker and the fondue set, but I've ended up with several sizes of stock pot and skillet, five cookie sheets (curious, considering that I have but one oven), and an orange juicer the size of a toddler.

I've since realized that my cookware usage follows the 80-20 rule: 80 percent of my cooking involves 20 percent of my cookware. The remainder of that cooking could probably be accomplished without the additional cookware, given a little improvisation.

When it comes to pots & pans in particular, I really only use eight of them. Just eight. The list is below -- I hope it saves you much cash and conflict with your live-in loved one(s).




1. 6-Quart Enameled Cast Iron Dutch Oven: Indespensible for stews, soups, pasta sauces, and anything that needs to be transfered from the stovetop to the oven.



2. 2-Quart Saute Pan: For my last birthday my mother gave me a Mauviel copper saute pan, and it's the one "nice" pan that I own. The flat bottom and high sides mean the pan can handle everything from roasting fish to sauteing vegetables to creating a sauce. Copper, which conducts heat evenly and responds quickly to changes in stove temperature, makes even cooking a breeze.


3. 12-Quart Stock Pot: For any task too large to fit in the Dutch Oven. Also moonlights as champagne bucket, vase, lobster tank, and watering can.


4. 3-Quart Saucepan: For smaller jobs like hard boiling eggs, making sauces, cooking oatmeal, melting butter.


5. 12-Inch Cast Iron Skillet: Cast iron gets hotter and holds heat longer than stainless steel or copper, making it ideal for searing things (think: mushrooms, steaks, bacon). Great for tasks that start on the stovetop and finish in the oven.


6. 10-inch Non-Stick Skillet: Primarily for omelets, which we now eat one night a week because they are dirt cheap, mindless, and oh so delicious. Also handy to have available as a third skillet during big cooking projects.


7. Roasting Pan: Can be used on the stovetop or in the oven for any and all roast meats.



8. 2-Quart Pyrex Baking Dish: Useful as a second roasting pan for small meats (small poultry, pork tenderloin) or for gratins, roasted veggies, crumbles, brownies, cornbread, etc.

BYOL: Corn Soup

Is it too late to tell you about corn soup? I don't know. A few days ago I managed to find fantastic local sweet corn at the greenmarket but as I write this it's a blustery, chilly, autumnal evening and nothing could be further from my mind than corn - a vegetable that I most closely associate with clam bakes, backyard barbecues, sunburns, and cold beers.

But this soup? I just have to tell you about this soup. For something that contains no butter, cream, or bacon -- for being, in fact, fully vegan -- it is extraordinarily luxurious and astonishingly flavorful. Thanks to all of the natural sugar and starch in corn, it could almost be confused for a kind of creamy, sweet porridge. Dishes like this one make me wonder why anyone bothers with things like fat free brownies, protein muffins, and low calorie potato chips when you can make soup from nothing but vegetables and a slick of olive oil that tastes this good. And in around 45 minutes and at a price of around $10, no less.

By this point, I have a solid few months under my belt of bringing my lunch to work. I have come to two conclusions: 1) That I can usually make something moderately healthy in an hour or two on a Sunday, which is roughly equivalent to the time I would spend in a five day week consulting takeout menus or wandering up and down Park Avenue trying to decide what to buy for lunch, and 2) That if I don't make my own lunch, I will end up eating something regrettable. That might mean outrageously expensive sushi takeout; since I work for a restaurant, it also might mean caving into "family meal," the food that the kitchen puts out at midday for staff. I know that this might sound like an no-brainer lunch option, but you have to understand that family meal is always both delicious and outrageously heavy. Try eating a grilled cheese sandwich and cream soup or a plate of meat sauce and buttered pasta for lunch and tell me you don't have your head on your desk by 3 PM. Then, tell me you can still button your jeans at the end of the month.

If brown bagging it isn't your thing, a pureed vegetable soup like this is a stellar option to serve at a dinner party. My mother, who was for years in the position of single-handedly putting on multi-course holiday meals, often made a pureed vegetable soup the day before and served it as an hors d'oeuvre about 30 minutes before dinner. In retrospect, it was an ingenious way to keep guests busy while she raced around putting the final touches on dinner.

If local corn is gone by the time you get around to making this soup, never fear -- you can substitute many other vegetables into this recipe, including but not limited to carrots, zucchini, butternut squash, and asparagus.


Sweet Corn Soup

Serves 6

1 small onion, halved and sliced
1 stalk celery
1 clove garlic, thinly sliced
9 ears corn
1 tablespoon olive oil
2 cups vegetable stock
Kosher salt
Freshly ground black pepper
Sour cream (optional)
Fresh dill (optional)

1. Remove kernels from corn cobs and set aside. Discard cobs.

2. In a large pot, heat oil over medium-low heat until it moves easily across the pan. Add onion and celery and cook until softened but not browned, about 5 minutes. Add garlic and cook until fragrant.

3. Stir in corn, salt, and pepper and let heat for 2-3 minutes. Add vegetable stock and bring stock to a simmer.

4. Cook partially covered for 5-10 minutes, until corn is heated through and beginning to soften. Remove from heat and strain through a mesh sieve, reserving liquid. Puree corn in food processor or blender to desired consistency, adjusting with cooking liquid to desired thickness. Season with salt and pepper to taste.

5. Serve warm or could, with a dallop of sour cream and/or a sprig of dill.

Braised Fish. Yes, Braised.

Yesterday, I had the unpleasant experience of coming face to face with my fall calendar. It was not pretty.

What is on the calender: work events galore, meetings with people that I successfully avoided all summer, weekend travel, everyone's wedding, the safe assumption that I will mostly not get home from work at reasonable hours, and house guests that, quite understandably, would rather do just about anything than have a homemade meal on their trip to New York City.

What is not on the calendar: cooking; quiet moments for blogging.

Ahhh. So this must be what everyone else's schedule looks like.

For the next couple of months, I predict a shortage of posts about do-it-yourself kitchen nerdery (making your own ricotta, carbonating water at home) and a wealth of information about clever new ways to feed yourself when you wind up with no time, mental energy, ambition, nor creativity.

...which is an apt segue into last night's dinner.

The first step towards making last night's dinner was talking myself into actually cooking dinner at all, as opposed to ordering takeout or eating a meal consisting of slightly expired cheddar, a Corona Light, and chocolate chip cookies. It turned out to be the right decision. I made the full meal in under an hour (which included some faffing around with laundry, channel surfing, and the like) and here's what I cooked:



-Tomato salad with fennel and feta: A reminder that a quick dinner doesn't have to be unsightly. I sliced the fennel and tomatoes that came in my CSA box and topped them with leftover crumbled feta, olive oil, rice wine vinegar, salt, and pepper. I took two extra minutes to think about presentation and ended up with something that I might actually serve to guests.



-Braised arctic char with lemon rosemary vinaigrette: the marriage of two things you probably never think to do, namely 1) use a vinaigrette on a protein and 2) braise a fish. I highly recommend both. Somewhere along the line vinaigrettes got pigeon-holed into the salad category, but they are so, so much better than that. A vinaigrette can make a versatile sauce as well as a braising medium. How to do it: sear the fish skin side down in an oiled pan over medium heat for 3 minutes, take it out of the pan, add vinaigrette (a cup or less), replace the fish skin side up, and let it sit in the simmering vinaigrette for about three minutes. Keep spooning the liquid over the fish as it cooks. Last night I used lemon rosemary vinaigrette (minced lemon rind, minced rosemary, lemon juice, white wine vinegar, and olive oil) but any kind of vinaigrette will do. I hesitate to call this way of preparing fish "idiot proof," but it's as close as they come.

-Brown rice: Nothing fancy here, just simple brown rice with some salt and olive oil. Always keep brown rice on hand for just these types of occasions. It's healthy and heats up well the next day for leftovers.

The Best Apple Pie You've Never Baked

The Viking always gives me a hard time about Labor Day. In America, unlike anywhere else in the world, we bookend summer with the two holiday weekends of Memorial Day and Labor Day. It’s all very neatly delineated: summer is over after the holiday weekend. That's it! It’s Tuesday, September 7, everybody out of the pool. Trade your white trousers for corduroys, put away the grill, close up the summer house. To those who did not grow up observing Labor Day, this exactitude of seasonal change (two weeks before the seasons technically change, no less) seems silly.

But the thing is, somehow fall always does manage to arrive right on cue. Yesterday morning on the way to the train station in East Hampton, it was 55 degrees, mist was rolling off the fields, and we stopped for three families of wild turkeys to cross the road. The light has changed. The air has become dry. The first apples, a half peck of Mackintoshes, arrived in this week's CSA box and I baked my first apple pie with them this weekend.

You probably know by now that I am not fond of New York summers. Maybe I'm doing something wrong but I don't like the sultry heat, the purposelessness, and most of all the Manhattanite diaspora that seems to occur each June through August. But fall! -- poignent, elegant, fall -- is my favorite time of year. It's a time for making stews, watching the leaves change, and take bracing, bare-sleeved runs in the crisp mornings.

Maybe this is why the delineating line of Labor Day has so much significance to me, far more than turning the corner from one calendar year into another on December 31. New Years always seems arbitrary, a dividing line between snow and gloom and...more snow and gloom. But Labor Day marks the transition between summer insouciance and fall industriousness. It's the start of the harvest.

Today feels like the right time for reflection and resolutions. Here are some of mine:

-Go to bed by 11 PM, not 1 AM, on weeknights
-Learn to bake the perfect bread
-Drink more water and less coffee
-When people introduce themselves to me, attempt to remember their names
-Finally begin training for that half marathon that I’ve been threatening to do
-Write handwritten thank-you notes
-Learn to sharpen my own kitchen knives

As I mentioned earlier, this weekend I celebrated the start of fall with a homemade apple pie.

Given that my father grew up on an apple farm, I've eaten a lot of apple pies in my day. Apple crisps, buckles, crumbles, tarts, and galettes too, but mostly pies. My grandmother was almost never without one in the house, and while I know that her pie apple of choice was the Mutsu, somehow no one has been able to track down her recipe. It definitely did not pass down to my father: when he made pies for us as kids, he used storebought crust and a simple filling of apples, sugar, and a little cinnamon. Those pies tasted wonderful to me because they were made by dad, but by the time I was a teenager I started looking for my own version.

Over the past decade I've tried every recipe I could get my hands on, and the one I use now is a slightly adapted version of one that I originally found in Saveur. It is the best apple pie I have ever eaten. And yes, you DO need to make the crust from scratch.

Classic Apple Pie

Serves 8

For the crust:
2 1/2 cups flour, sifted
2 tbsp. sugar, plus more for sprinkling
1 tsp. kosher salt
18 tbsp. very cold unsalted butter, cut into small pieces
1 egg, lightly beaten

For the filling:
6 apples, preferably Mutsu, Bramley, or a mixture of Cortland and Granny Smith, peeled, cored, and cut into 1/4" pieces
3/4 cup sugar
3 tbsp. flour
2 tbsp. apple cider vinegar
1 tsp. ground cinnamon
1/4 tsp. kosher salt
1/4 tsp. freshly ground nutmeg
1/4 tsp. freshly ground ginger

1. To make the crust: Combine flour, sugar, and salt. Add butter and work with hands until the flour resembles coarse meal flecked with pea-size pieces of butter. Continue to mix with hands, sprinkling in a total of 6–8 tbsp. of ice water one tablespoon at a time, until the dough begins to hold together. Transfer dough to a lightly floured surface, divide in half, and form 2 dough balls. Flatten each dough ball slightly to make a disk. Wrap disks in plastic wrap and refrigerate for 1 hour.

2. Heat oven to 425˚. Roll out each disk of dough on a lightly floured surface into 12" rounds. Fit 1 round of dough into a 9" pie plate.3. To make the filling: In a large bowl, combine apples, sugar, flour, vinegar, cinnamon, salt, ginger, and nutmeg. Transfer filling to the pie plate, brush edges of pastry with some of the egg, and top with remaining pastry round. Trim edges with a knife and crimp with your fingers. Brush top of pastry with remaining egg and sprinkle with a little sugar. Using a knife, make 4 slits in pastry top and poke with tines of a fork.

3. Transfer pie to oven and bake for 20 minutes. Reduce heat to 350˚ and continue baking until crust is golden brown and a knife inserted into one of the slits slides easily through apples, about 40 minutes more. Transfer to a rack and let cool for 2 hours before serving.

Reinventing The Loaf

Pictured above is the whole wheat focaccia that I made the other night. I give it a C-, tops.

Generally speaking, the bread that I bake is sub par. It's decent when eaten hot (all bread, I have come to learn, is decent while still hot) but as soon as it cools it turns into roofing tile. This "rustic" focaccia in particular struck me as something that Medieval peasants might have turned up their noses at. All in all, not really what I'm going for with the homemade bread thing.

I know enough about bread to know that my problem lies somewhere in the kneading and/or rising components; unfortunately, I do not know enough about bread to be able to fix it. Not even after I bought Jim Lahey's acclaimed book, My Bread, which has been hailed as an "idiot-proof" method for baking bread. Well, apparently a few idiots manage to slip through the cracks, because my bread still sucks.

And yet I have bread baking in my blood. My aunt and grandmother, both farmers' wives, made their own bread. It's a ritual that relies on experience, carefully honed technique, and attentiveness to the smallest of details, which makes it a skill much better handed down from generation to generation than read about in a book. I never learned it from my aunt or grandmother because I wasn't interested in cooking while either of them was still alive, and in the past few decades it has not been fashionable to take a young girl aside and force domestic skills upon her.

Thus, my roof tile quality bread. I've decided two things. First, I will press on, reinventing the wheel if necessary in pursuit of a bread making method that yields the desired results. You're likely to hear more about this in the coming months. Second, when I have children, they will be the only fifth graders who know how to make a flawless baguette.